June 2018

ERIC MANN—I had a positive experience in prison, though I was a Jewish kid from Long Island and over my head. The other prisoners looked out for me. They said, “We saw you on TV.  You were arrested for something you believed in.” Ultra-leftism was beaten out of me in prison. I went back to being a community organizer, only this time in prison. Soon after I got out, George Jackson was shot and killed and then right afterwards came the Attica uprising. I joined the Attica Defense Committee and became a journalist and wrote for The Bay Guardian, Boston After Dark and The Boston Globe. I was fired from the Globe for an article about Israel.

GARY LEUPP—This is potentially a key moment, in which finally the unholy alliance based on a Faustian bargain between the U.S. and European anticommunists in the late 1940s fractures. What is the greater threat to Europe? The Russian state, which has gone through the agonizing process of full-scale capitalist restoration and a period of total chaos in the 1990s giving way to recovery under Putin, and which currently spends about 14% of what the U.S. devotes to military expenses every year? Or the U.S., which (still) wants to dictate European policy, even as its GDP dips relative to Europe’s? The EU GDP is now 90% of the U.S.’s.

ANDRE DAMON—What really stands exposed is the propaganda machine operated by James Bennet, the editorial page editor of the Times, who manipulates the news in the service of the intelligence agencies to promote war abroad and political repression at home. For Bennet, when one lie is exposed, the time has come to reply with an even bigger lie.